Patterns and Representation in Arabic Place Assimilation

Book excerpt: This book is a phonological investigation of place assimilation phenomena in two major Arabic dialects: Cairene Egyptian and Baghdadi Iraqi. The studied phenomena involve interactions between consonants (various types of local assimilation), between vowels (monophthongization), or between consonants and vowels (emphasis spread and labialization). Throughout the content chapters, the patterns for each of these processes are carefully described and validated by ample data, and then analyzed representationally using a minimalist model of feature geometry. The analysis follows a holistic approach, as the representations are consistently used for all the segmental phenomena within a dialect. The first exclusive treatment of place assimilation in colloquial Arabic, this book will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students of Arabic linguistics and dialectology, and to phonologists in general, and can be a point of reference for researchers examining the details of such phenomena in other dialects of Arabic as well.